Saturday, 20 December 2014

I do the majority of my work in Emacs - from the composition of linguistics
articles and chapters, to lecture slides, to keeping track of grades, to email.
Much of what I do requires a monospaced font, and much of what I do requires a
good Unicode font. Which narrows the range of potential font candidates
significantly. And, since I spend so much time looking at it, I would like the
font to be aesthetically-pleasing.
After trying many different fonts, at different sizes and so forth, I’ve found
that DejaVuSans Mono is really the only font which meets all of these
criteria. It is really a good-looking font too. Here it is in a few different
applications:

Figure 1: DejaVu Sans Mono in mu4e mail

Figure 2: DejaVu Sans Mono in LaTeX doc

Figure 3: DejaVu Sans Mono displaying some Unicode

And…it appears to be the same font used in the terminal in Tron: Legacy:

Those are cool notes - thanks for sharing. My process was much less systematic and much less well-documented. I did some web-searching both for "best monospaced font" and "monospaced unicode" and read what people had to say, but a lot was trial-and-error. The other font I used for a while is FreeSans [ https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/ ], which is courieresque. FreeSans doesn't seem to render as well though, and, as I recall, a few of its wingdings-type characters are actually not really monospaced, so it messed up alignment in my mail. I also briefly tried Fantasque Sans Mono [ http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono ], but the "k" character bothered me immediately so I didn't persist. Really, in the end, most monospaced fonts seem to lack good unicode support....but DejaVu Sans Mono really is quite aesthetically-pleasing too.

About this blog

Posts on a variety of topics, including steam-powered analytical engines, Linux, (La)TeX, and Emacs. Some posts are musings, some are hacks for getting things to work right, some are useful tips I came across or came up with, some are links to topics of interest.